On Tuesday, thousands of teaching assistants (TAs) and contract faculty at York University in Toronto walked off the job, forcing the university to cancel classes for its 55,000 students. This came just a day after teaching assistants at the University of Toronto voted to go on strike, though U of T has said its campus will remain open.

At York, the 3,700 members of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) have several specific demands: among them, tenure for its contract (sessional) faculty, job security for its TAs and a living wage for graduate students trying to balance academic demands with real-life expenses. And now faced with the prospect of a prolonged strike — perhaps echoing the ordeal that lasted three months in 2008 — York’s undergrads have taken to social media to express their dissatisfaction with a single refrain: Cry me a river.

They, too, will be thrust into a workforce where temporary, contract employment is the norm for recent grads. Indeed, Statistics Canada reported that in 2013, 29.9% of workers aged 15 to 24 were considered temporary, with the rate of contract employment growing at triple the pace of full-time. York undergrads must endeavour to find a balance between academic demands and living expenses, though they, unlike graduate students, do not receive a minimum of $15,000 in funding. And to top it off, they’re now forced to grapple with the uncertainty of an unfinished semester — for which they’ve likely already paid in full — and the possibility of courses now stretching into summer and affecting work plans.

Strikes are always an inconvenience to someone — residents who stop getting their mail, homeowners forced to drive their garbage to the dump and so forth. The irony in the case of the York strike, however, is that striking workers are inconveniencing those who are in markedly similar positions to themselves, at least in the case of the teaching assistants. They’re students striking in spite of students, and with that in mind, it’s no wonder they’re not getting much of a sympathetic ear.

To be fair, not all of those who walked off the job are of the same position. Indeed, while sessional instructors and TAs are lumped into the same umbrella local, they work for on very different terms. Working as a TA is, generally speaking, a means to an end (that is, a graduate degree), whereas those employed as sessional instructors have already reached that end, often after racking up several degrees. Contract employees usually don’t have benefits, job security or the freedom to pursue research in the same way that fully employed, tenured university professors do, but universities like them because they’re relatively cheap.

Graduate students, on the other hand, occupy a position that is transient by its very nature. They are students who are funded by grants, scholarships and income from jobs as a teaching or research assistant. And while students will tell you that the pursuit of a graduate degree is full-time work — and in a sense it is, usually occupying more than 40 hours per week — it is not the same as full-time employment, as performed by sessional instructors and professors. Graduate students are students, not full-time university employees. That distinction is likely why many undergrads are finding this strike a little hard to swallow.

The last time York University cancelled classes because of a strike, students were out of lectures for three months. There’s no indication of how long it might stretch this time around, though at the point of writing, no further negotiations between the two sides have been scheduled. For the last couple of days, CUPE members have been picketing York’s campus with banners presumably directed at undergrads, saying how “the quality of your education is based on the conditions of our work.” And undergrads, no doubt, are reading that sign to the song of the smallest, saddest baby violin.